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A Long Way From Home

By

John Simon

Updated June 2, 2005 12:01 a.m. ET

Having lived so long with their subjects, memoirists often hurtle into imparting every last particle of their accumulated information. Some of this may tickle prurient or gluttonous readers, but even they may boggle at a surfeit of foot-dragging paragraphs. This is where Frederic Morton's "Runaway Waltz" (Simon & Schuster, 212 pages, $25) scores its first winning point: It comes in at a slender 212 pages. Mr. Morton, the author of a dozen works of fiction or nonfiction, nimbly covers what he subtitles "A Memoir From Vienna to New York" at a pace that sometimes slackens but never bogs down in a...